Acts 7: 44-60

(Acts 7: 44-60)

Our fathers had the tabernacle of witness in the wilderness, as he had appointed, speaking unto Moses, that he should make it according to the fashion that he had seen.  Which also our fathers that came after brought in with Jesus into the possession of the Gentiles, whom God drave out before the face of our fathers, unto the days of David;  Who found favour before God, and desired to find a tabernacle for the God of Jacob.  But Solomon built him an house.  Howbeit the most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands; as saith the prophet,  Heaven is my throne, and earth is my footstool: what house will ye build me? saith the Lord: or what is the place of my rest?  Hath not my hand made all these things?  Ye stiffnecked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, ye do always resist the Holy Ghost: as your fathers did, so do ye. Which of the prophets have not your fathers persecuted? and they have slain them which shewed before of the coming of the Just One; of whom ye have been now the betrayers and murderers:  Who have received the law by the disposition of angels, and have not kept it. When they heard these things, they were cut to the heart, and they gnashed on him with their teeth.  But he, being full of the Holy Ghost, looked up stedfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God,  And said, Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God. Then they cried out with a loud voice, and stopped their ears, and ran upon him with one accord,  And cast him out of the city, and stoned him: and the witnesses laid down their clothes at a young man's feet, whose name was Saul. And they stoned Stephen, calling upon God, and saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. And he kneeled down, and cried with a loud voice, Lord, lay not this sin to their charge. And when he had said this, he fell asleep.

 

Stephen's statements in the Sanhedrin court continued, leading to an argument for the Curtain of Evidence. In connection with the second accusation against him, the charge of blaspheming the temple, Stephen points out the fault of the Jews' worship of the temple. After God brought the Israelites out of Egypt, He made the tabernacle, the tabernacle of witness, made through Moses in the wilderness. This tabernacle was a symbolic place of God's presence and a meeting place between God and the Israelites.

In the tabernacle, there was a stone tablet, or testimony, of Moses inscribed with the Ten Commandments, and the Ark of Testimony, the ark of which the testimony was put, was enshrined in the Most Holy of the tabernacle, so the people called the tabernacle the tabernacle of testimony. It was also called the tent of meeting because it was the place where the Israelites and God met.

Stephen's argument began with a reference to the tent of evidence, the predecessor of the temple. This tabernacle of witness was created in the time of Moses and became the center of Israel's religion for 480 years, until Solomon built the temple. However, in the wilderness, the Israelites worshiped idols while still with the veil of evidence, which was a symbolic place of God's presence. That is, the Israelites did not fall into idolatry because they did not remember God, but it tells us that they worshiped idols at the same time, even though they clearly knew they were with God.

Stephen said that the Most High God does not reside where man was built by hand, and attacked the Israelites' false beliefs about the temple. It is pointed out that the God of Israel is not bound by the place of the Jerusalem Temple, and therefore it is wrong to think that the Jerusalem Temple is the only place where God is present. God appeared to Abraham when he was in Ur in Chaldean, and with Joseph when he was in Egypt, and there when Moses was in the wilderness of Midian, and commanded the movement of the tabernacle, the symbolic place of His presence.

Later, when Solomon built a fixed temple, he said that the heavens are my throne and the earth is my footstep, and God did not designate only one place as the holy land. God is above all, unifying all things, and being among all things, not being confined to a place built by hand, that is, a temple or a shrine built by man, but is not restricted to a specific space.

The Jews were very proud of the temple, and more than anyone else, they were proud to keep the laws kept in the temple. However, they killed the prophets who foretold Christ who would come to this earth, and eventually killed Christ, the true temple that the temple points to. All of this was because they were confining God in the temple in Jerusalem, and they misunderstood that they were maintaining their full faith as religious practices in the temple. Their eyes are blinded to the truth, and their conscience is darkened.

Quoting the words of the prophet Isaiah, Stephen revealed that the omnipresent God was not imprisoned in the temple in Jerusalem, and countered the wrong idea of the Jewish religious leaders who identified God with the temple in Jerusalem.